I've recently begun toying around with a theory regarding the evolutionary course of mankind. What I'm finding may point to the man-made mass extinction of what we believe the human to be.
Over the years there has been an ever increasing number of what psychology would label psychopathic or sociopathic behavior. Virtually emotionless people who lack the ability to connect on an emotional level, lack the ability to fully experience emotion.
Society has been constructed in such a way that people are encouraged to hide their emotions. Not only in that men, for instance, are taught not to cry, but that children must put up with full scale bullying in school and employees must often put up with similar situations, but are essentially forbid by their employers from expressing the emotions they feel in the face of an unruly customer or overly authoritative manager.
I recently heard about a blog post in which someone running their own business commented that they can have plenty of wonderful interactions with customers, but a single irate person can ruin their entire day. I find this is quite common in business, but because competition in business is so fierce employees and employers must refrain from expressing their true feelings in the face of an irate customer, they are required to hide their human emotions or face termination.
Because such large numbers of people are required to hide their emotions, because such large numbers of people have their emotions used as a weapon against them evolution has taken a turn and begun to produce, in increasing numbers, people without emotion.
Unable to feel remorse these people are more likely to become violent offenders because they lack the emotional connection to others, they lack the ability to care about others and because they do not experience emotion on the same level of others they cannot relate to the emotional pain certain actions cause.
I find that in movies the artist often draws the line between human and robot as being that a robot lacks emotion where the human does not. If this theory is true then it indicates that the human race may be enforcing their own extinction.
P.S. I do not believe that today's psychopaths or sociopaths are completely void of emotion, but it could be that evolution is moving in that direction.